EC: UR3 table-top robot

Motion Control: UR3 is the world's most flexible table-top robot to work alongside humans, offering 6-axis capabilities in applications where size, safety and costs are critical. This is a Control Engineering 2016 Engineers’ Choice Awards Winner.

The Danish pioneer of collaborative robots has created a new, smaller robot for light assembly tasks and automated workbench scenarios. The new compact table-top robot weighs only 24.3 lbs, but has a payload of 6.6 lbs, 360-degree rotation on all wrist joints and infinite rotation on the end joint. These unique features make UR3 the most flexible, lightweight, table-top robot to work side-by-side with employees in the market today. It’s an ideal choice for applications that require 6-axis capabilities where size, safety and costs are critical.

UR3 is an optimal assistant in assembly, polish, glue, and screw applications requiring uniform product quality. The new robot can also be used in a separate work station mounted on the table, picking, assembling and placing parts in optimized production flows. Because of its compact form and easy programming, it’s easy to switch it between tasks to meet agile manufacturing needs making total cost of ownership low and payback period fast.

UR3 has 15 advanced, adjustable safety settings. One of these is the unique force sensing that enables the UR3 to limit the forces at contact if the robot collides with an employee. The new robot has a default force sensing of 150 N but can be set to stop if it encounters a force as low as 50 N in its route.

The UR3 features the same 0.1 mm repeatability as the UR5 and UR10 robots and can follow the outline of a surface—such as the aluminum edge around a smartphone—by "feel" rather than through the programming of precise movements and coordinates, which otherwise would require more than 100 data points programmed into the application.